Being able to prioritise is an effective skill of anyone with direct reports to manage. As they say in airplane safety videos, attach your own mask before you attach masks to your children. Managers need a way to prioritise what they do each day for themselves, before they can support the team around them. The best way I have found to organise my to-do list and prioritise my time, is to use Dr Stephen Covey’s Urgent/Important Matrix. (Google the tool and you’ll find many versions of it.)

I use Covey’s Matrix as my weekly planning tool - alongside the monthly view of my online calendar and an online tool tracking sales deliverables. I draw the quadrants in a blank A4 book and place all my weekly tasks in the appropriate quadrant. Each week I use this as a guide to what I need to get done and as a reminder of how important or urgent each task is. I’ve done this for eight years, and although I miss tasks here and there, I know I have 95% of what I need to do each week allocated to a quadrant.

The discipline of using a tool like this weekly helps you to prioritise – to decide where you should be directing your attention. We all have a tendency to enjoy certain tasks over others. The trick is to be disciplined to not just do the tasks you enjoy, but to do the important stuff that really matters!

Click here to download a version of the prioritisation tool.